Deadline’s Roots Run Deep at Whiskytree

Since its inception in 2007, Whiskytree has
grown from a talented matte painting shop into a full-service CG
powerhouse known for creating complex visual effects for feature
films, commercials and video games. Based in San Rafael, CA, the
agile company’s employee headcount generally hovers around 25
but is often scaled up as projects demand. Whiskytree’s
credits include VFX-heavy blockbusters Captain America: The
Winter Soldier,Thor: The Dark World,
Elysium, and TheHunger Games: Catching
Fire. To deliver these stunning visuals, Whiskytree has
embraced a ‘Work Smart’ ethos that emphasizes a strong
hardware backend running top-notch software – including Thinkbox
Software’s Deadline data and process management solution.

Whiskytree deploys Deadline to manage the processing of all data
on the render farm, not just renders. The studio also runs
deliveries through the software to create QuickTimes for review;
transcoding, conversions, file copies and system back ups are all
processed through Deadline as well. “We can’t always
start from scratch so we leverage the strength and effectiveness of
off-the-shelf components,” said Votch Levi, VFX supervisor,
Whiskytree. “Deadline has become a key central tool in our
operation; we pretty much run everything through Deadline in some
way, shape or form.”

Whiskytree’s primary content creation package is
Autodesk® Softimage®, with Autodesk® Maya® and Autodesk® 3ds
Max® lightly used for file format conversion. Compositing is done
in The Foundry’s NUKE and auxiliary tools include Adobe
Photoshop, Autodesk® Mudbox®, The Foundry’s MARI and Sitni
Sati’s FumeFX. Running on Windows, Whiskytree regularly uses
around 1,200 render cores, but has capacity to run 3,000 cores if
jobs require.

Environment shot from Elysium; image courtesy of
Whiskytree

When Whiskytree originally installed Deadline in 2010, its
render farm was far more modest. Tapped for approximately 100 VFX
shots on the first Thor film, the company doubled its
machine count to 20 as the project kicked off, with Levi
spearheading the transition to Deadline. He explained,
“I’ve set up render farms in the past with 800 nodes in
Deadline and done some really big projects where we submitted
hundreds or thousands of jobs to the render farm every night. I
knew Deadline would be more than up to the task of growing our
render farm.”

Since then, Deadline has been used on every subsequent
Whiskytree project, including two films shortlisted for the 2013
Best Visual Effects Oscar® – Elysium and Thor: The
Dark World.

Environment shot from Elysium; image courtesy of
Whiskytree

“Deadline is so flexible; we can use it in any way
imaginable. If I need something to be processed more than once,
I’m going to do it on the render farm. When we do transfers
to other facilities and deliveries, those happen in Deadline. That
way we can queue them, organize them and set priorities,”
Levi shared.

In addition to file transfers, Whiskytree uses Deadline to
process time-consuming FumeFX caches and crowd data in Softimage.
Paul Hudson, tools developer at Whiskytree, has executed a fair
amount of scripting to customize Deadline plug-ins and even created
a proprietary application called XSI Factory, which allows the
Whiskytree team to take jobs from inside of Softimage and offload
them to Deadline for processing – whether exporting a crowd,
processing Arnold Scene Source files or converting geometry.

“It’s fantastic that Thinkbox was smart enough and
kind enough to make the source code available for the plug-ins and
in the language of the host application. We tend to start with the
shipped versions, which work great out-of-the-box, then heavily
modify them to suit our needs,” Hudson noted.

Whiskytree has also relied extensively on Deadline’s
ability to provide information to Shotgun’s production
management database. While functionality is now built-in, the
studio initially modified Deadline plug-ins to update Shotgun.
Currently, everything from scene statistics like memory usage per
node, render time per frame and memory per frame, as well as render
settings like frame size, render resolution and anti-alias settings
are all stored in Deadline. The software then pushes that
information to Shotgun, which allows Whiskytree to build statistics
and review trends for a particular job.

“The folks over at Thinkbox really understand how render
managers work and how we need them to work in a production
environment. If we have a problem that we can’t sort out on
our own, I know the Thinkbox support team is going to jump on it
and get everything working for us,” Levi concluded.

About Thinkbox Software

Founded by Chris Bond in 2010, Thinkbox Software develops
production-proven tools for visual artists and backs each product
with highly responsive support. Used across entertainment,
engineering and design, Thinkbox’s products include Deadline
high-volume data management software used to render or process
files and several other artist-driven software tools to create,
visualize and modify datasets for visual effects, animation and
digital simulations. For more information, visit www.thinkboxsoftware.com or follow @thinkboxsoft on Twitter.

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